Kara-Djigach

A new article from the science journal _Nature_ throws another wrench in the mystery about the origins of the greatest pandemic in history, the Black Death. Here you see the Chüy Valley in modern Kyrgyzstan and one of the tombstones involved in the recent study. Dating to 1338, and written in Syriac, the stone’s translation reads: “It was the year 1649 (CE 1338) and it was the year of the Tiger, in Turkic Bars. This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. He died of pestilence (“mawtānā”).

This stone, and the burial ground it lies in (called Kara-Djigach), had long been known to historians and the suspected area of the plagues’ first outbreaks, but connecting the dots specifically was made possible by the genetic sequencing of plague bacteria found in some of the tombs. The new analysis was able to confirm that the Bubonic Plague of the infamous 14th-century was in fact responsible, putting a definite date of this killer microbe to at least nine years before the disease hit Western Europe (it probably killed more people than the Spanish Flu, at a time when Earth’s population was much smaller, making it the most lethal pandemic to date).

Kara-Djigach was a fascinating place — it was probably founded after the Mongol invasions, perhaps by refugee immigrants. They belonged to an ancient sect of Christianity called the Nestorians, but they followed the Seleucid calendar that had descended from the dynasty following Alexander the Great’s conquests, as well as the Turkic animal-cycle method of dating. The community’s income likely was grounded in long-distance trade — always a vector for disease, unfortunately.

A motley assortment of historians from various disciplines (including Paleo-biologists) will have to wrangle with how this new study squares up with the work done a few years ago by Monica Green, arguing that the Plague actually got started by marmots in the Tian Shan Basin in the early 13th century.